In the following essay, Uglow argues that Eliot's troubled and lonely personal life pervade “The Lifted Veil.”

Three weeks before Adam Bede was published in February 1859, Marian and Lewes were investigating the subject of floods, ‘looking into the Annual Register for cases of inundation’ and by the end of March she could promise Blackwood another long novel, ‘a sort of companion picture of provincial life’. This was to be The Mill on the Floss. But although Adam Bede was an instant, outstanding success, reprinting numerous times in different editions, translated into four languages and earning enough to ease the Leweses of financial headaches, the year in which she wrote her new novel had elements of sadness, loneliness and suspicion. Her success, about which she cared intensely, often felt like an anticlimax...